Knowing your bandwidth speeds will help you determine which barn camera system will work best for you.  Your Internet operates in two ways.  Download speeds are those you are most familiar with.  They are used when surfing the web or watching a movie.  They are usually the higher of the two and for all practical purposes, they don't matter on our systems (unless you're watching somebody else's system).  Upload speeds send information from your system out to the Internet.  This is used when sending your request to look at a web page or watch a movie, but those are very small files (requests) and very rarely come into play.  When using a barn camera, your video stream heads to the outside world and goes out through these upload speeds.  The exception is when viewing at home.  We set up all of our systems with a Home and an Away address.  The Home address works much like a printer in your home, your phone or computer talks to it across the local network but it never leaves your router's network- therefore you don't use any bandwidth and your speeds are lightning fast. 

Our most popular High Definition Barn Camera System uses your internet's upload speed when you are viewing the cameras while away from home. Once your system is installed, Riverwind will set up a local network for camera viewing. This means that when viewing your cameras from home, you won't be using any internet at all. It will always be high speed and full resolution, even if you internet speeds are spotty or down completely. When you're away from home, you are at the mercy of your Internet.  You should have an upload speed of .6 mbps or higher. Lower speeds will work, but you will have images that occasionally "hang up".  To many, this is a window into what is going on and is enough for them. Images are high definition. Even if the picture does freeze, you can zoom in and get a good idea what's happening in your barn.  Again, this will only be when watching away from your house. Viewing from home will always be high speed and full resolution.

Our new Stand-Alone Barn Camera System requires no internet at all. You can watch this system on your TV. This system is the best option if internet is not available to you. If you happen to have High Speed Internet with unlimited bandwidth, this system will provide the best of both worlds. You are able to view from your TV at home, as well as on your devices from home and away. The exception would be satellite or cellular based high speed Internet.  These services usually come with data limits.  Sometimes plans are unlimited but they reduce speeds at a certain level.  The nature of these services does not allow us to use the cloud server or port forwarding without using up all of your data.  The good news, our High Definition System will get around those issues, but you won't have the TV viewing.

You can check your bandwidth speeds by googling "Google Speed Test" or click here. If you have any questions about what your speeds mean for your system, please don't hesitate to reach out.